Trump gets to nominate 188 ambassadors. With his bizarre selection of John Huntsman to run the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, he's now chosen 6, two of whom are career professionals-- Todd Philip Haskell to Republic of Congo and Tulinabo Salama Mushingi to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.The others are a bunch of political cronies. The only one confirmed so far is Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador.
I hadn't been back in America very long-- having been living abroad for nearly 7 years-- when I ran into someone I had met years before when I booked a Doors concert at my school. It was Danny Fields, who had gone from being an A&R man at the Doors' label, Elektra, to working as a journalist and managing a new band. He wanted me to see the new band. I didn't want to. He insisted and insisted until I agreed.
I haven't really kept up with the music business since retiring from Reprise. But I'm still a music fan and I was excited, about a month before the election, to hear the new Green Day album, Revolution Radio. The first single was the anti-gun nut song, Bang Bang and when they performed it at the American Music Awards a couple weeks after Trump won the election, Billie Joe inserted the lyric/chant, "No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA." The response was electric and downloads went crazy immediately.
In a display of startling intellectual dishonesty-- even for someone as laughably dishonest as Hate Talk Radio host Laura Ingraham, she has certainly changed her tune on Russia since Trump crawled out from underneath his reality TV celebrity. And she's now considering a run against Tim Kaine for his Virginia U.S.
Was I lucky when I became the president of Reprise Records! The label had just debuted Green Day's Dookie and it was hurtling past gold and platinum sales. They reminded me of my favorite band, The Clash, in so many ways, not the least of which was a very genuine ideological perspective that encapsulated the ideals of the French Revolution-- liberté, égalité, fraternité-- and my first job was to persuade our European companies, which were ignoring the record entirely, that Green Day was for real. First stop: London. The chairman of our U.K. affiliate was condescending and steadfast.
